Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
checksums
I learned to appreciate the value of the Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) algorithm in my 8-bit, 300 baud file transferring days. If the CRC of the local file matched the CRC stored in the file (or on the server), I had a valid download. I also learned a little bit
prototyping
Tim Weaver, channeling Robert Glass, on the five laws of prototypes: 1. The answer to any prototype / feasibility question is always yes 2. Whatever poor coding practices you use to build your prototype will be replicated in the final production version 3. No matter how poor the performance of the
software design
Rube Goldberg software design is the meme of the month, after being parodied by Rory Blyth and Scott Hanselman in this brilliant short video, and oddly enough, also currently appearing in Microsoft advertisements: Now compare that to an actual Rube Goldberg device: You can’t talk about Rube Goldberg these
presentations
Like most developers, I don’t get a lot of experience giving presentations. The golden rule is: practice, practice, and more practice. Then incorporate the feedback from those practice sessions into your presentation. Of course, it helps to perform practice sessions in front of people who have seen a lot
parsing
I’ve blogged ad nauseam about how much I love Regular Expressions, but even the mighty regular expression has limits. As noted in Daniel Cazzulini’s blog: A full-blown programming language cannot be parsed with regular expressions. But given the limited number of programming languages (successful ones, let’s say)
craigslist.org
If you’ve ever used Craigslist.org – a fantastic and rather odd resource – you may have noticed that it’s heavily biased towards per-city searches. This is a pain if you want to do a national search across all cities that Craigslist.org operates sites for. A while back, I
usb drives
It’s a geek rite of passage: what’s on your keychain? Here’s mine: * 512mb Sandisk Cruzer USB 2.0 thumbdrive * Leatherman Squirt S4 * Arc AAA LED flashlight I carried a Leatherman Micra for years, but I forgot to ditch it prior to a business trip and it got
java
John Carmack, the primary developer of Doom and Quake at id Software, posted some great comments on his recent experiments with cellphone game development in Java. My favorite? there is something deeply wrong when text editing on a 3.6 ghz processor is anything but instantaneous. That’s quote of
.net
I finally finished updating my CodeProject article, Convert any URL to a MHTML archive using native .NET code. It’s based on RFC standard 2557, aka Multipart MIME Message (MHTML web archive). You may also know it as that crazy File, Save As, “Web Archive, Single File” menu option in
user experience
When working with users, I am frequently reminded of this conversation in David O. Russell’s movie Three Kings: 0:00 /0:51 1× GATES What is the most important thing in life? TROY What are you talking about? GATES What’s the most important thing? TROY Respect? GATES Too
software development concepts
Although you eventually outgrow them, any developer worth his or her salt bears the scars of a thousand tiny religious wars. It’s an occupational hazard, as Steve McConnell notes in Thou Shalt Rend Software and Religon Asunder: Religion appears in software development in numerous incarnations– as dogmatic adherence to
ui
I somehow doubt this is what Joyce Kilmer was thinking of when he wrote the poem, Trees: I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree. It’s unfortunate that the TreeView is one of the standard widgets in a usability designer’s toolkit, because trees